Monday, April 21, 2014

Review - Noah (2014)

Darren Aronofsky, the director that gave us acclaimed films like Black Swan, The Wrestler and Requiem For A Dream, has decided to test the blockbuster waters and what a mess it turned out to be. The movie follows Noah (Russell Crowe) who is chosen by The Creator to build an ark as he intends to wipe out humanity.

The Good?

Noah is visually breathtaking. Aronofsky creates a beautiful to look at world filled with more fantasy elements than I expected. The CGI is well done and the grandiose scenes with the ark, flood and such looked quite authentic and lovely. Another added plus of Noah is the performances from the cast: Russell Crowe gives us an okay performance, Emma Watson gives it her all, but the most impressive performance surprisingly came from Noah's wife played by Jennifer Connelly. That scene with her getting all emotional was the best part of the whole movie for me.

The Bad?

Seeing that Aronofsky decided to stray from the source material and create his own little Lord of the Rings type of world, I expected a lot more excitement but I didn't manage to get that at all from Noah. The movie is BORING. I respect Aronofsky for wanting to give us his own take of the famous biblical story --- however what I didn't expect at all was the atrocious writing associated with this epic. Aronofsky went way over his head with this one as his version of Noah made little to no sense. From the beginning, the movie just rushes on by without explaining itself properly. Even the added fantasy elements felt like a total waste because sadly the director's ambition was too much for this story -- various plot points just didn't mesh or make much sense. At times, it felt like Aronofsky had no idea what he was doing and what direction he wanted his story to go in. Is it first time blockbuster jitters? Perhaps. Despite the actors giving it their all, the character development was rather poor. Of course this is attributed to a very weak and laughable script. How do you make a movie of over two hours long surrounding just a few characters but yet they all felt so shallow and irrelevant? Anthony Hopkins character is a prime example - absolutely irrelevant in this story. There are some real laughable moments in Noah and I don't mean that in a good way. The only character I was able to connect with for about a total of two minutes was Jennifer Connelly's, which pretty much says a lot about this film.

Conclusion
Noah is a simple biblical story which Darren Aronofsky twisted into a total mess. Sometimes different isn't always good.